NOAO Office of Public Affairs and Educational Outreach

From the 2006 NSTA Meeting in Anaheim

Day 1 – Thursday

The National Science Teachers Association meeting generally starts the minute you get off the plane (if not before!) While waiting for my luggage at the airport, I immediately spotted a group of three science teachers who had flown on the same flight from Tucson. They were easy to spot—young, excited to be at their first national conference, and had that agile look that comes from wrestling with young minds.

The three women told me that they came from the same private school in Tucson and taught science from preschool to 5th grade. Our conversation began with problem solving—we needed to get to Anaheim from LAX, a distance purported to be over 40 miles. The conference information had alluded to several ways one might get to the hotels, but it wasn’t quite clear what the best (or cheapest) way might be. I told them about the Disneyland bus that goes right to the conference hotels, but comes only on the hour. They had some information about shuttle vans. We decided on the van, since it was getting late and cold, and the bus, if it existed, wouldn’t be coming for a while. In the van we met another science teacher from Boston. On the way to the conference hotels, we caught up on the usual topics: school testing, teaching young kids, how hard teaching is today, and how we became teachers. As is often the case, one teacher’s father was a teacher, principal, and then superintendent of a school.

When the bus got to the Disneyland area, we parted to pursue our separate dreams for the next few days of collecting pounds of science give-away materials (or kilograms since we science teachers think metric), pages of new curricula, and attending some great talks. They wished me luck as the van dropped me off at what turned out to be the wrong hotel. Getting lost at these meetings turned out to be a common theme, repeated again and again as attendees searched for various rooms for workshops and talks. Though it was getting late, I went out after checking in to the hotel to explore the conference area, and to find our room where our workshop would be held the next morning. While searching for the workshop room I ran into our partners from the GLOBE project and we caught up on the latest statistics for GLOBE at Night and promised to meet for a drink later in the conference.

The next morning, I went to the first of the five workshops that NOAO is presenting, and was thrilled to see it filled with teachers, well ahead of the starting time. (I was equally happy that our presentation room, which was missing tables and chairs at 11 p.m., was now setup properly at 8 a.m.) The workshop was on some new ideas for teaching about the Sun. It was well-presented by one our favorite TLRBSE teachers–she always does a terrific job. With one down and four to go, I decided to head for the next challenge–the exhibit hall.

My usual strategy for the exhibit hall is to make a quick run around, looking for good giveaways that might be scarce a few hours later. This is hard to do though when the exhibit hall makes a soccer field look small. However, I started to make my circuit. My strategy paid off, and I found some great items including a plastic tank with some kind of colored oil inside that made cool waves. (I gave this later to a colleague with a young child.) I also found two great books related to our optics education project, which I bought. Later I checked out the NASA area to see if they were giving out anything special. They had loads of materials, but nothing I hadn’t seen before. I ended up taking a load of calendars, and then ran into someone I had wanted to talk to, who was also taking a load of calendars. He had just made the brash decision to get a box of NASA calendars to bring home to teachers (it was take them or leave them, NASA wouldn’t mail them to him). His decision to take box was worth about 40 pounds, and he was struggling to carry them. I offered to load them onto my rolling map case so we could take them over to store at his booth. It turns out his booth was about 300 yards away, on the other side of the hall. So we had a nice talk on the way over, and once there I met two more people I was hoping to see at the meeting and needed to talk to about our Hands-On Optics project.

That is how it goes at these meetings, the shortest distance between two points seems to always be a detour. You find the people you want to see by some indirect process as often as by the direct action of going to the booth or talk you think they would be at.

There were a few other detours this afternoon, and I am looking forward to a few more tonight. (Actually 3 groups of old friends and colleagues have come by to say hi or talk for a while as I write these words in the hotel lobby.) At the conference today I have already run into about 10 teachers I know from our TLRBSE program and have caught up a bit on their life. Next I will take the pounds of educational materials I have picked up in the exhibit hall back to my hotel, dump it off, and go back to the exhibit hall to continue stocking up. Then I will be ready for tonight’s demonstrations, receptions, and meetings, which will probably go on until about midnight, unless I get distracted by an unavoidable detour again.